The Art of
Katalog_Boris-Lurie_English
Katalog_Boris-Lurie_English
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116<br />
01<br />
REINHILD<br />
DETTMER-FINKE<br />
in collaboration with<br />
Matthias Reichelt,<br />
SHOAH and PIN-UPS:<br />
<strong>The</strong> NO!<strong>Art</strong>ist Boris<br />
Lurie, a documentary,<br />
88 min., Germany,<br />
2006, 00.41-01:10 min.<br />
Boris Lurie took another path. He became neither an empirical chronicler<br />
<strong>of</strong> the mass extermination, nor did he attempt, as others, to set an example<br />
against trivialization by means <strong>of</strong> bold actions. In this respect, he cannot<br />
be assessed as a “Holocaust artist,” although his life and artistic work is<br />
shaped by the persecution by the National Socialists‘ death machine.<br />
After a short phase <strong>of</strong> reminiscing in drawings on his four years in different<br />
concentration camps, he shifted his work to the interpretation <strong>of</strong> the<br />
collision <strong>of</strong> the world <strong>of</strong> survivors <strong>of</strong> the mass extermination and <strong>of</strong> a society<br />
that would not become interested in the conditions <strong>of</strong> survival until decades<br />
after the end <strong>of</strong> the war. In his search for a form <strong>of</strong> artistic expression<br />
that would do justice to this “clash <strong>of</strong> cultures,” he tried and tested various<br />
conventional styles, all <strong>of</strong> which he then rejected. In the late fifties, he then<br />
established the NO!art movement, as distinct from Abstract Expressionism<br />
and Pop art, along with Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman, two artist friends<br />
who had served in World War II as soldiers. In a small art gallery in what at<br />
the time was the inexpensive East Village <strong>of</strong> New York City, the artists’ group<br />
addressed the themes that were on the agenda in the United States after<br />
McCarthyism: repression, puritanism, sexuality, and sexism, but also international<br />
political problems and their impact on an art world that gave outsiders<br />
no chance. Lurie’s art became a weapon against everything that he<br />
perceived as disruptive and unsettling. This included criticism <strong>of</strong> the crimes<br />
in Europe as well as his experiences in the United States, where media coverage<br />
<strong>of</strong> the mass murder <strong>of</strong> European Jews was sandwiched between advertisements<br />
and gossip columns. In his assemblages, he addressed the puritanical<br />
ban on publically presented intimacy in works simultaneously displaying<br />
commercial eroticism and the pictorial transmission <strong>of</strong> the mass<br />
extermination as a link between sexuality, death, and historical ignorance.<br />
His works met with indignation and rejection by the art market, art critics,<br />
and collectors. This reaction reinforced his refusal to <strong>of</strong>fer his works on an<br />
art market.<br />
Lurie’s use <strong>of</strong> symbols <strong>of</strong> the Nazi state and <strong>of</strong> the mass extermination—<br />
the swastika, the “yellow star”—<strong>of</strong> excrement, knives, and axes, should never<br />
only be understood as direct references to the Holocaust. <strong>The</strong>y express a<br />
general refusal to come to terms with an imperfect world. <strong>Art</strong>, in Lurie’s<br />
opinion, has to address contradictions and deficiencies. “I would have loved<br />
to make pretty pictures, but something always prevented me from doing<br />
so,” he states in the documentary film Shoah and Pin-Ups. 01<br />
In a letter to Boris Lurie, the artist Wolf Vostell, who died in 1998, writes <strong>of</strong><br />
his supposition that, “every painter would have a difficult time obtaining<br />
recognition with ‘evil,’ enlightening, and dialectical image material...” And<br />
continues: “That’s why you will have a hard time in the United States and will<br />
have a hard time in Berlin... I wish you a fitting place in the new collection<br />
CILLY KUGELMANN